


along the shore

by Cards_Slash



Category: Assassin's Creed
Genre: Blood, M/M, Mpreg, People Eating Mermaids, Sexual Content, Violence, mermaid!au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-24
Updated: 2016-06-24
Packaged: 2018-07-16 22:43:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,156
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7287631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cards_Slash/pseuds/Cards_Slash
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A half-fish half-man saved his life so Edward owed him a favor.  He just didn't expect that would involve 'breeding season' for semi-immortal dual-sexed half-fish.  He also didn't expect to end up as a father to a semi-cannibalistic infant demon but very few things in his life worked out how he thought they might.</p>
            </blockquote>





	along the shore

**Author's Note:**

> the 'fish saved his life' portion of this story was a comment fic on tumblr to be found [Here](http://bewareofchris.tumblr.com/post/135014886617/mermanfederico-and-castawayedward-rated-pg-13)

Edward was looking for a drink and not a fight but there were many fights and very few pints to be found. It seemed everywhere he went on the shitty little island, there was some man or another that recognized his face and too exception to presence. Even the hood (useful on bad days) didn’t seem to be doing a decent job of hiding him from men looking to start something. So he had a fat lip, a short temper and no liquor when he happened across a pocket of noise he couldn’t ignore. 

The commotion was mostly out on the sand beyond the dirty planks that made up a walk way in the unholy shit hole he’d been meandering through. There was a cluster of familiar faces from his latest crew making a perimeter around a spectacle. Edward flipped the hood off his sweat-soaked hair and edged his way into the crowd. The voices coming from the center was a confusion of shouting and grunts of effort. He did not hear the leathery whisper of the whip until he saw it uncoil across the sand. There was some Spanish bastard with blood across his face wiping the back of his hand across his mouth, spitting to the side with a menacing mutter of sound. He was glaring at the bare, hunched back of the man they shackled to the broken mast of an old ship wreck. The man was still jerking at the chains that kept his arms hugged around the wood.

Spectators were divided between drunken joy, red-faced cheering and stone-faced outrage. Edward stood behind two men catcalling their appreciation for the inevitable whipping; his whole body was prickling with a sudden rush of bloody-red heat rising to his skin. He wasn’t above a show of strength when it was called for but he was no fan of this. 

The crack of the whip was sudden and strong enough that it startled the half-drunk men that were standing around him. The flinch moved through the crowd, the answering wet snap across the poor man’s back. He jerked, and his face turned toward Edward. The red part of his lips showed the brightness of his pointed teeth. He did not scream but drawn in a breath as his hands turned to fists and his arms flexed thick with muscles, pulling with all their might at the links of the chain that held him. 

“Fuck,” Edward snarled. He shoved the man in front of him into the drunken cluster of fools shouting for another lash. His hand pulled the hood back over his head as he stepped out into the sand. It shifted under his boots, kicked up by the unstable fools that had fallen into one another. “Let him go,” Edward said. 

The Spanish fool with the whip was shouting at him, the words a rapid fire of furious demands. 

Off to the side, the sorry lot that he employed were coming to some sense of sobriety. Adewale had been summoned by the noise and he slid into the space near Edward with a sideways murmur, “what have you gotten us into, Edward?” 

“I take exception to men being beaten like animals,” Edward mumbled back. Which was as good an excuse as any. (And certainly more believable than, he’s a half-fish that saved my life when I was marooned on a desert island by a mutinous crew.) He may have said more but a new crowd of Spanish fools came running onto the beach. 

“Kenway,” Adewale growled at him. 

\--

The more pressing trouble wasn’t clearing the beach of the Spanish bastards, but removing the shackles from Federico’s blood wrists while the fish was hissing under his breath, gnashing his teeth together so hard there was blood dripping down his chin. Without his gills and the vibrant color of his fins, he wasn’t as overtly dangerous. Never the less, the fish was a man-eating monster and there was a beach full of groaning delicacies that had wronged him. 

Edward crouched in front of him, tipped forward toward Federico’s face. “If I let you go, you cannot attack here.”

Federico bared his teeth again; his inhuman eyes round and gleaming in the light. His nostrils pulled in tight and flared out again as he dragged air into his lungs. “I will have their blood,” he hissed back. 

“You can have it—not here.” Edward waited until Federico seemed to nod and then opened the shackle and let him loose. He immediately threw himself backward and scampered across the sand, kicking it up with his bare feet and hands. For a creature that was meant to swim, he was relentlessly quick across land. “Fuck,” Edward shouted. He ran after the man and grabbed him by the chain dangling off his right wrist. It stopped him just short of getting his teeth around the neck of the nearest man. Rather than stop him, it just seemed to shift Federico’s focus from eating the unknown men to Edward.

Whatever Federico meant to say was lost in a growl of rage that didn’t seem to be any one single word. He ran across the sand and knocked into Edward hard enough to jar every part of him on the inside. His hands—oddly textured as they were—closed around his throat as he bared his teeth. The stink of his breath was like the ocean when it went dark, full of the unknown things in the deep. As strong as the fish was, it was _mind boggling_ that he had ever been captured. 

“Wait,” Edward hissed through his tight throat. “You can have them, just wait.”

Federico wrinkled up his nose in distaste. “Bring them to me,” he hissed. And Edward only had the time to nod before the edge of his vision blackened. Federico didn’t immediately let him go, his thumbs pushed in tighter against Edward’s throat before the pressure lifted and he was able to breathe again. It flooded into his lungs like a welcome relief. “Fine, take me to your filthy ship, then.”

\--

It should have been noted, Edward had never had anything beyond gratitude for the fish. Certainly nothing that should have brought them to the uncomfortable interior of his painfully small captain’s cabin. He busied himself with stripping off the sandy layers of his clothing and shaking them out while Federico plodded across the floor to poke at the map, and his display of cutlasses. His back was bleeding from the lashes he had gotten, the blood a slow seep down his cool-white-flesh. 

“We’ll wait for dark. They’ve already gone to their ship but I know where it’s anchored. I can sneak on it and get the ones you want.” Edward threw his coat across a chair and went to pluck a half-empty bottle from his lagging supply. “You should tend the wounds if you want them to heal clean.”

Federico turned to look at him. His human form was strange, as if he had been confined to a space far too narrow and tight. The skin across his bones seemed pulled taut. His lips thinned to pale slivers when he smiled and his teeth were many and _sharp_. “The sea will clean them.”

Edward took a drink (or two) to that. He sat on a stool that was far to near to the ground and leaned his shoulders back against the wall. The sway of the shallow water soothed the ragged edges of hurt leftover from the fight. “How did they catch you anyway? Something like you?”

“There were eight of them,” Federico said. But also, as he looked forlornly toward the sound of the water beneath them. “I am not well fed. I have come looking for you and that necessitates an unfortunate camouflage.”

“Me?” Edward repeated. “Why would you come looking for me?”

Federico’s smile faltered. “Perhaps I will tell you if you keep your word. If you do not bring them to me, perhaps I will eat you instead.” He pulled a seat out and sat in it. 

“Charming,” Edward mumbled. “Well, I’d better go and see what I can learn on shore. Best to know what sort of fight I’m in for, securing your supper.” He stuffed the cork back in the bottle and slapped it on the table. “Stay here. Try not to get caught.” 

\--

The crew was mostly ashore, and mostly drunk, and so there were very few people to worry about seeing what happened when Federico got wet. None the less, Edward took him as far away from the shore as he could manage before he motioned for him to get out of the boat.

“I prefer them alive,” he said before he slid into the water. It was black under the moonlight and quick to take him down. The man was a pale sliver descending into the ripples of the disturbed water but when he came up again, his webbed fingers were pointed at the edges, the gills on his neck flared open and shut again. He dropped the soggy pants into the bottom of the boat. “I like the meat when it’s freshest.”

“You’ll get what you get,” Edward said. 

The fish circled the boat, a long-lean shape in the water, with the spines and fins on his back breaking out of the water. He wasn’t as big as a shark but no less menacing as he sliced through the water. Then he was gone, dipped too far beneath the surface to be properly seen. 

Edward rowed to the Spanish ship with an ungrateful taste in his mouth. It was quick and delicate work, extracting the guilty parties from their posts and beds. He knocked them unconscious with the butt of his pistol and dropped them into the water. The shock must have woken them up because he could see the struggle of their bodies just before they were pulled down. 

Again and again he went, until all eight were bloody red froth beating against the ship. The fish did not come to thank him and Edward couldn’t help but feel it was for the best.

\--

Edward _was_ drunk and enjoying the generosity and industry of an unknown benefactor as he lounged lazily in a hammock strung between two trees. There were sounds of life to the left-and-right, a lazy cyclone of noise all around him that was easy enough to ignore. He was open-mouthed, half-asleep, enjoying the fog of decent liquor that put him out of his misery (so to speak) even if only for a minute. Even the fading sun was magnanimous in his opinion, taking away the startling heat of the day and dropping heavy, dark shadows that brought a blessed coolness to the sweat puddles making his shirt cling to his body.

There were boots on plank boards and quick-bartered words behind him somewhere. Edward didn’t turn his head to look, but listened to the quick exchange, money-for-services. Lazy and fat on drinking as he was, there was no moral he wasn’t willing to bend. So he stayed where he was, on the creaking hammock, with his ears full of heat like the little grunts-and-moans of effort and the slick-slap of skin-on-skin. 

It was liquid heat, a low-burning kind of thing, that settled in the bottom of his gut and stirred through his drunk dick. His hands were broad-palms and greedy spreading across his own skin. His fingertips like strangers walking across his belly to find a sliver of bare skin between the torn ends of his shirt and the ragged rolled waistband of his pants. His fingernails a delicious kind of threat running across his skin as he stretched to get more comfortable. 

The pair were done fucking long before Edward was ready to be done listening. He frowned at the embarrassing quick-and-dirty affair. They parted with hardly a second to spare, the whore (one assumed) off to pursue clients better suited to the task and the man off to tell tall-tales of his prowess to anyone stupid enough to listen.

Edward grimaced at the night: dark, cold and unfulfilling like his most recent attempt at fantasies.

So he took a drink when he thought he maybe should have rolled back to his feet and gone to find someone willing to help him make use of the arousal thrumming so hopefully through his veins.

\--

Edward woke up on the ground, squinting at the sunlight slanting through the knots in the hammock and the rustling leaves above it. He woke up to the urgent smell of seaweed and decaying fish that turned his stomach so violently he rolled onto his stomach and puked last night’s ill-advised indulgence. 

“I ate a drunk man once,’ Federico said _suddenly_. He was sitting with his back to the tree and his unnatural human legs stretched out lazily in front of him. “I did not enjoy him. It made him bitter and _dry_.” 

“Seems like it’s in my best interest to keep drinking then.” Edward flopped back onto his ass and dug the bottle he’d dropped out of the sand. It must have landed upside down because the rim of it was covered in sand and the inside was dry as a bone. “I thought you’d left.”

“I did not leave, I _ate_. You left and it took longer than I liked to find you.” His fish-pale skin was gleaming and _smooth_ when the light hit it, exactly the sort of thing that would attract the curious gaze of men like the Spaniards. “I do not appreciate having to find you twice.”

Edward threw the bottle and grabbed his coat instead. His head was pounding and his gut was rolling (not least of which from the smell of the fish itself) as he fought his way back to his feet. “I didn’t ask you to find me, mate.” Then he closed his eyes to stall the shift of the planet under him and the sloshing sensation in his head. When he was able to move without falling, he opened his eyes again and found Federico standing very close to him. His sharp-sharp teeth just visible between the part of his lips. “What?” Edward asked.

“I need your help,” Federico said. “You are the only human I know.” (Possibly because he had eaten all the others.) “Find an excuse to isolate yourself and I will find you.”

“What is the help you need?” Edward asked. It was funny how he asked that, funny how his voice sounded low and private. It was funny the way the stink of the sea on the fish turned his gut but a sticky kind of _desire_ was stiffening up his dick the longer he stared at Federico. Oh-it-was-funny, and it wasn’t, how eagerly he wanted for the answer to his question.

“Find an empty place, Edward. I’ll find you there.” Then Federico was leaving again, slipping out across the sand on his quick-quick feet to a curve in the shore. He disappeared into the roll of a lazy wave so seamlessly it seemed as if he had never been there at all.

\--

Kidd was impatient with disappointment to be blown off. “What’s so important, Kenway?” Her hands on her hips with every muscle in her body in tense, sharp relief under her masculine disguise. (Days like this, fully sober and entirely aware, he felt like a fool for having gone so long without seeing the obvious.) She either divined or guessed from the spread of Edward’s hand that he wasn’t going to answer the question because she scoffed at him with _disgust_. “I hope you find a treasure big enough to be worth the cost of your soul—I thought you were a changed man, Kenway.” 

He rolled his eyes at that. “I can change all I like, I’m still a man,” Edward answered.

That made the low-broil of anger on her face blossom to full rage, “so you’re leaving me for a _woman_.” Not exactly, he was _leaving_ her for a fish and he was half-confused how he’d settled on the notion of sex and Federico nestled up nicely together but he had. It was stuck in his skull with a growing urgency to find the stupid fish. If Edward were a smarter man, in possession of self-control and morals, he might have stumbled across the idea that running off to hunt down a mermaid would only end in his death. 

Edward had no answer to the disbelief on Kidd’s face and no way to defend himself. 

“Fine,” Kidd shouted at him. “Jaysus, Kenway!” she shouted at him. “Go!” she motioned him away, “get it out of you system so you can think with your brain for once!”

\--

Edward left his crew and the Jackdaw at a friendly harbor. There was a bar to entertain the boys and a decent crew to offer repairs and upgrades that Adewale had been demanding they get. It was easy to slip away, to steal a small craft and find an island with decent tree coverage, a small spring of fresh water and no other humans to speak of. He made himself a nest in the soft dirt and took a nap while he waited.

\--

Federico found him in the murky morning light. Absent the necessity of civilization, the fish had simply chosen not to bother with the pretense of human clothes. “Do you fuck the human woman that shouted at you?” Federico asked. The question was casual enough that the brazen way the fish stepped across his legs and dropped down to set himself Edward’s lap seemed out of place.

“Kidd?” Edward said. His hands found their way to Federico’s bare skin, his palms rough against the smooth-smooth flesh of his sides. He was _hot_ and Federico was as cool as the ocean itself. “No.” But, also, “how’d you know she was a woman?”

Federico’s hands were between them, tugging at the fastenings of his pants like they offended him. That funny sort of smell was back, the kind of thing that should have turned his gut—the unknown stink clinging to Federico’s hair. But Edward was arching his hips to help divest himself of clothes while his hands were rubbing up and down Edward’s chest. He was built like a man, all ribs and muscle and smooth-belly flesh. “I can smell you.” His hand was _cold_ around Edward’s dick and it should have shocking and unwelcome. 

“I don’t fuck men,” Edward said with his forehead pressed against Federico’s and their mouths close enough to share the rancid stink of the fish’s breath. It seemed exactly like the most important thing to say because his hands were pushing Federico backward. His body was following along, so he was stretched over the man, pressed together chest to hip. 

“My kind has no men, or women,” Federico said. “There is only one. We are all the same.” His legs spread open oh-so-easily and his cool-smooth-hand was pulling Edward in by the dick, lining him up to where he was slick and open. 

“What is this?” Edward asked. Even if he’d waited for the answer, there was no stopping the flex of his hips, the _need_ to fuck Federico—spread out and begging for it— He was gritting his teeth with his hands in the dirt, stalled out with his dick half-in and the damned fish-man sighing under him in _perfect relief_. 

“Breeding season,” Federico said. But then, “fuck me.” His hands were around Edward’s hips with the same presumptive ownership he’d employed when he saved Edward from the empty island so many months ago. His will was to be obeyed and immediately—Edward would have been offended if it weren’t so very _easy_ to give in. 

\--

“Breeding season?” Edward repeated when he had enough brains collected to bother. The fish was sitting by the edge of the clear, fresh water scoop little handfuls up to rinse off his thighs with a cringe of distaste for being sullied the way he was. 

“Yes,” Federico said. “I won’t have another for fifty years and you will be dead by then. I was curious what it would be like and I did not have a second chance to try.”

“ _Breeding_ ,” Edward repeated. He couldn’t complain on account of the sex but on the assumption that he would want to have a child with the fish. (What would a child conceived with a dual-sexed man-fish even end up like?) 

Federico looked over his shoulder with one of his eyebrows pulled up to demonstrate how unimpressed he was. “Is there another word for it I have not learned? Ezio enjoys his seasons, he calls them ‘orgies’ and spends weeks repopulating his island.” Once his thighs were cleaned of the evidence of their fucking, he turned around to look at Edward. “You have too many complaints. I’ve seen the sort of humans you fuck. You are never so picky.”

“I don’t fuck them to have babies,” Edward snapped back. “And they’re _human_ , that isn’t being _picky_ , it’s a basic standard.”

He expected a fight, but not the way the fish rolled up onto his knees and crept across the soft dirt. He wasn’t prepared for how he slid into his lap again, how his hands folded around Edward’s arms or the smoothness of his cool skin to settle so evenly against his body. The whole weight of him a reminder of how recently he’d been _inside_ of him and how _delicious_ it had been. “You aspire to standards, you do not have them,” Federico said. 

When Edward touched him, he started to _hum_ the way he had in the water, circling the island he’d trapped Edward on. The song of the mermaids that brought men to ruin, flinging themselves like full meals into the waters of the ocean. It was _hypnotizing_ , the way the smoothness of Federico’s skin was unreal and _perfect_. Edward want to push him away and call him names; he wanted to demand that he stop using advantages against him. 

“I can’t make you want to fuck me,” Federico said softly. “You have to want me for it to work.”

“What to work?”

“This,” Federico said when his hand closed around Edward’s dick. He was _hard_ again, so soon after the first time, and it was a head-spinning rush that made his fingers prickle and his vision go dark at the edges. But the fish was only smiling at him, nosing at his jaw and pressing his cool-wet mouth against the pulse of Edward’s throat. 

There were a hundred things Edward thought he would say, ninety nine of them were demands for freedom and complaints about mistreatment. Only one of them was, “get on your back,” as he rolled them again. 

Federico was willing and easy; Edward was compliant and angry. They fucked like that, in the dirt.

\--

Federico brought him fish in the evening and swam in the little pool of fresh water while Edward made a fire. He crept out of the water on his human arms and legs, dripping the water off his skin as soon as Edward finished eating. 

“The child will probably die,” Federico said when he invited himself back into Edward’s lap. “And even if it does not, you will never be burdened with it.” His hands were not soothing but purposeful, finding their way across Edward’s skin like searching for whatever part of him that would arouse him most. 

“Why would I want a child I did not want to live or see?” Edward asked. He did not wait for an answer but shove Federico back and then roll him onto his hands and knees. His back was long and well-toned, his hips tilted to make it simplest to fuck him. There was no shame in the instinct of it; and Edward’s face was still burning red when he leaned across his back. It was _animal_ the way they fucked.

\--

Federico was out on the shore when Edward finally found him the next morning. He was wearing the shirt he’d stolen, sitting with his knees bent and pulled up toward his chest and his eyes watching the roll of the waves with a distinct sort of loneliness. There was dissatisfaction in his face that Edward could _understand_ , even as separate as they were. “My brother will laugh at me,” Federico said. “He will mock me until he is sick from it.” Then he sighed.

“Why?” Edward asked.

“I have berated him since we first found humans like you in our water. I have told him you are food and not fuck mates. He delights in this carnality. He has captured and kept prisoner a host of the most attractive humans he can find and they worship him as a god in the flesh. I eat humans like they delicious meals they are intended to be.” He looked at Edward then and there was no separating the lingering hunger from the growing arousal in his face. “Yet, here I am.”

“Aren’t there other fish like you? Someone else that can—breed with you?” 

“There must be. But there have not been here for many years. We are the last of our kind here.” He looked out at the water again and crossed his legs so he could lean forward. “We were many once. Time has divided us—there were some that left the water to walk on land and they never returned. The land ages us. We grow old and fat and die.” 

“How old are you?”

Federico smiled, “I am older than you can imagine. There is no number I could name; I have lived longer than there has been time and calendars.” Then he looked at him again, “you should congratulate yourself, I have lived a hundred, perhaps a thousand, of your lifetimes and I have never let myself breed.”

Smugness (so Edward had heard) was a terrible trait in a lover, but he was grinning in a way he couldn’t quit. “I’m your first then?” It was hardly the most important thing that had been said but it stuck in his grin until his face hurt. Federico nodded without pretense. “I never thought of myself as so charming.”

“Ha,” Federico said. Then he got to his feet again, “come on. It’s not much longer before breeding season is finished. I want to enjoy you while I have the urge.”

\--

Federico left while Edward sleeping. He left with no promise of ever returning or of sharing the fate of their child (if a child did come to exist). Edward tried to consider himself lucky to escape any responsibility or worry but the notion of his possible child out in the world nagged at him.

I distracted him during the day and it followed him through his dreams at night. 

Over weeks, and months, it must have driven him to madness. He parted ways with his ship and his crew under untruthful pretenses and he found his way through a collaboration of trade routes and small boats to the island where Federico had brought when they met the first time. Standing on the white-white sand of the island with nothing but his clothes and a worried-half-sense of obligation, he was left wondering how stupid a single man could be.

\--

It took a week of effort, and more diving and run-ins with unfriendly sea creatures before he found Federico, lofty and unworried, sleeping in his sea bed. The fish was resplendent in the water, his tail striped and fanned out with spines. His belly smooth and his back pocked here-and-there with glittering scales. His eyes were different underwater, the whole shape of his face altered by the lack of proper nose or ears. But he had gills that flared out at the sides of his face and down his neck and sharp claws at the ends of his fingers. 

His gut was swollen just round enough to betray him. Edward was short on air when the fish finally decided to acknowledge him there, floating beneath the water. Federico smiled at him with a lazy flicker of his tail before dart forward and grasping him beneath the arms. On land, Federico was fast and strong but beneath the water he was a bullet, slicing through the sea as if it were nothing. His body was smooth and sinewy and he took them up-and-up to the shore in mere seconds. 

“Stupid human,” Federico said. “I was just dreaming how nice a full meal would be.” 

“Then you should eat the shark that’s tried to eat me twice,” Edward said. He felt the sharp edges of Federico’s claws pierce through the flesh of his back and the sting of the salt water across the open wounds. It was hard to forget and hard to remember, all at once, how dangerous the fish really was. Suspended in the water like he was, feeling the powerful twist of his body keeping them afloat and watching the widening of his black irises at the smell of blood in the water—it was easy enough to realize Edward was only prey. “Might be hard to explain to the kid how you ate its father.”

Federico rolled his eyes and pushed Edward toward the shore. He followed him, creeping up into the shallow waves on his belly. The length of his trail rising out of the water to twist in the air and then fall back again. “The children rarely live,” Federico said. “If you have come to see if yours will survive you have likely wasted your time.” There again was the flick of his tail, like a great cat instead of a fish, twitching in the water to show how delighted he was to have a fun mouse to play with. 

“If there’s a chance I haven’t, I’d like to know.” 

That puzzled the fish. He narrowed his eyes at Edward and pushed his elbows into the sand to slide backward into the next wave. “Did you wound the shark?” he asked. “The one that tried to eat you?”

“You’ll see,” Edward called.

\--

Federico brought him a torn piece of shark meat to eat and lounged on the sand until his body dried out from the sea water. As odd as he looked beneath the waves with his belly swollen, the human body was odder. He had all the features of a man: a masculine jaw, thick shoulders, ample muscle, and a flat chest. But his gut was rounded into the unmistakable shape of a pregnant woman and his hips—recently unremarkable—had widened. 

“They drown,” Federico said without compassion. “The human spawn, they are born without gills and the sea takes them. Ezio used to give his back to the human fathers that made them but they wither and die.”

“Why?” Edward asked. 

Federico shrugged. “I have never had a child. I am too old to remember if I were ever a child.” He got to his feet with great effort and motioned inward away from the beach. “I did not plan to come ashore.”

“Then why have you come?” Edward got to his feet and followed after Federico, trying his best not to offend the fish by offering to help him. He was amused (and shouldn’t be) by how he walked with such care, almost like a waddle, but he kept his face as serious as he could manage. 

“It would be rude to let your child drown while you’re on the shore waiting to meet it,” Federico said. He found the small camp that Edward had made by the fresh spring and sighed over the lack of comforts there. “Make a nicer place to sleep. I am heavy.” He motioned at the poor little wallow that Edward had made and then motioned at their surroundings as if there were anything there to soften the ground. And while Edward rolled his eyes, Federico slid into the fresh spring with a sigh of relief. 

“Why don’t you turn back into a fish in fresh water?” Edward asked.

“I live in the sea, not puddles,” Federico said. Then he leaned his shoulders against the shore and closed his eyes against the shine of the sun. “It could be good that you have come. I was going to feed the child to the shark. Perhaps that is why he wanted to eat you; he was hungry from the promises I made.”

\--

On the second day, when Federico was at his worst, peevish and blood thirsty, their sorry camp was interrupted by a third. He came from the interior of the island, picking his way through the overgrown green around them. There was an odd pinched look to his face and a softness to his fish-white belly. He wore nothing but a pair of dirty pants that were barely long enough to reach his knees, patched again and again with thick dark thread. His face was smudged with dirt and when he smiled, his teeth were as sharp and as many as Federico’s.

“I should have expected nothing else,” the man said.

Federico was hateful with a grimace. “Go away, Ezio. I have no use for you.” But he cocked up his eyebrow at his brother. “Where did you drop the infant?” There was no care in the words (at all) but a clever kind of dig. 

“It did not live,” Ezio said. It did not seem to bother him in the least. “I will need to clear the island soon. There are too many of them with my eyes. It poisons them.” Then he looked over at Edward again with the air of a connoisseur. Whatever he saw failed to impress him, so he looked down at his brother instead. “Would you like assistance?”

“No,” Federico said. Then he motioned at Edward, “it is his and he wants it, he can handle it.” 

Ezio paused a moment and then shrugged. He went through the camp, out toward the sea. Once he was beyond seeing distance, Federico huffed like an ungrateful child. Edward cleared his throat, “how does he intend to clear the island?”

“He drowns them. He won’t let me eat them because they are his children.” Federico sighed like it was such a burden. “Don’t waste your efforts feeling sorry for them; they are his to let live or to let die. He saved them from the sea, he brought them here and raised them. They understand.”

Edward only sighed. 

\--

His child was born bloody and discontent by a crudely made fire, under the darkest part of the night. Federico had woken him up by digging his claws into Edward’s flesh and dragging them across. The pain of it had dimmed during the ordeal of assisting a man-eating fish in giving birth. He had never been present at the birth of anything, much less anything remotely human, and the basic mechanics of it had seemed obvious to him before he witnessed the horrific reality. 

If Federico was peevish to be pregnant and stuck on dry land, he was driven to madness by the effort of birthing their child. His threats had started as soon as he had woken Edward and they had devolved from words to grunts to growls, to attempts to catch Edward and rip out his throat. 

When their child was finally born—sliding out of its Mother, slick and white and covered in blood—Federico had collapsed into the poor bed that was made for him. Edward was knocked back on his ass by the reality of the child, and the look of it. There was enough human in it to pass, a rounded nose, pinkish little ears and lips but its skin was belly-white and _cool_ the way Federico was always cold. Its eyes were fish eyes, inhuman in their stillness as they peered at him from its human face. 

“Is it breathing?” Federico asked. He sat up and leaned in so their foreheads were together, the pair of them looking down at this child that was neither a fish nor a man precisely. It was breathing, the steady rise and fall of its chest marked it as _living_ even as it looked at them with a dreary calmness. “I have never seen a living one.” There was only a hint of fondness in his voice. “It’s ugly,” was downright loving. He ran his thumb across the infants face, to wipe away the slime and blood that covered it. 

“She’s not ugly,” Edward snapped back. 

“Humans are conditioned to adore their offspring. Your kind are fragile at birth; if nature did not demand you love your offspring, they would not survive.” Then Federico got to his feet with a hiss of pain. 

“Where are you going?”

“To eat,” Federico answered. “Do not worry if you cannot keep it alive. They always die.”

\--

Edward washed his daughter in the fresh water of the pool. When she was clean, the inhuman whiteness of her flesh seemed even more unnerving than the blood. He wrapped her in an old shirt and laid her on the ground so he could clean himself. He scrubbed at the ripped skin of his arm until the scabs were rubbed off and the blood ran free.

His daughter cried, a sharp-loud-sound. Her whole face suffused red as the blood on his arm and her body wriggled in a fit of rage just beneath the shirt he’d wrapped her in. Her howls were primal; he picked her up and she screamed _louder_. She was strong enough to squirm and wiggle in his inadequate grip. “What?” he demanded from the child, “what do you want?” He had successfully avoided infants the whole of his life and was left with no idea as to what any baby would want (much less a hybrid like this). 

Her answer was another howl. He shifted his hold on her to accommodate the relentless squirming of her body and her face slid across his arm where her _darling_ mother had raked his claws through Edward’s flesh. Her cheek was cool and soft but her mouth was damp and warm when it closed around the open wound and _sucked_ at the blood. 

All at once, with the greedy sound of her gulping, she stilled into perfect peace and her pale-pale face pinked rosy. 

Edward didn’t move for fear of inciting her rage again. It was better to be still, better to not think how his child (barely more than an hour old) was drinking his blood. Her gums were blunt and hungry knocking against the open edges of the wound. 

It made sense to him then, how these fish-children had never lived for very long. It made sense how they had withered in the arms of their human fathers. It was _unnerving_ to be eaten and she was most certainly eating him, gnawing and sucking at the wound with pure instinct. 

\--

Federico did not come back with haste, but washed ashore with a wave long after the sun had risen and their cannibal child had allowed herself to be rocked to sleep with hiccups of cries and blood dried across her face. 

“What?” Federico asked when he dug his elbows into the sand and pulled himself close enough to look at their child. “You look unhappy. Isn’t she what you wanted?” His finger swiped across her mouth and he smiled to find the crust of blood there. 

“Stop smiling,” Edward said. “If she had teeth she would have eaten me.”

Federico rolled so he was on his back and dug his hands into the sand to pull himself up to sitting (as best as one could when they were half fish). “I had not considered she would be hungry for meat so young.”

“It wasn’t meat! It was my blood!” Edward shouted and he shouldn’t have. It woke their daughter and she jerked awake with a shrill shriek of unhappiness. Her face turned toward his arm but he had turned her so she could not reach the sore-raw-wound a second time. Her squirming made her difficult to hold, and Edward was tired and unnerved even before her screams turned as hateful as her Mother’s had been during her birth. He handed her to Federico.

The man took their child and held her against his smooth-pale skin with a gentle hum that was lower-and-sweeter than any sound he had made before. It seemed to vibrate out of him from every direction and the baby turned her face to mouth at his flesh. She complained until she found a nipple and her mouth closed around it with the greedy intent that she had used in drinking Edward’s blood. “I don’t like this,” Federico said immediately.

Edward snorted. “I didn’t like her drinking my blood.” He leaned in against Federico’s side to watch. She was less of a demon with her eyes closed and her mouth sucking at _him_. All her grunts and little sounds of appreciation seemed cuter when they didn’t involve the red smear of his blood on her face. “Does it hurt?”

“No,” Federico said. “But I do not like it. We will take turns.”

“We can’t take turns, I’m not a woman.”

That made Federico look at him with his eyebrow up and his mouth pulled down into a frown. “You said she was content to drink your blood. It’s fair.”

“It’s not fair,” Edward snapped back. “She’s a baby. Babies drink milk. You have milk.”

Federico stared him with narrow eyes and flat lips. His whole body went suspicious still and his breathing evened to a skeletal sound drawn in-and-out, and when Edward was fighting back to the urge to flinch, Federico said, “I eat men. You’re a man.” 

“If you were going to eat me you would have done so by now,” Edward said. He was only half convinced it was the truth as he said it. The words were bold and that was all he needed them to be—a loud boast to buy him a minute and a smile from Federico (even though he tried to hide it). “If she can’t survive on milk, she can have blood.”

“Fine,” Federico said.

“Fine,” Edward repeated. 

\--

Their daughter (in need of a name) lasted two more days of feeding exclusively on milk before her screaming because intractable and her rounded cheeks grew wan and thin. Her impassioned wriggling dimmed to fitful attempts. Federico said, “I told you, they do not often survive.”

It might have been better to let her die now—the thought (complete and cruel) had occurred to him on the sandy shore, as he watched Federico disappear beneath the roll of the waves long after midnight. The baby was content to sleep with the sound of the water near to her ears—a true fish stuck in human form, she was cold and smooth the way a shark might have been. Her eyes were round and strange. She would never find a place with humans; she could not follow her Mother to her true home. Edward held her as the sky went dark and he thought of what her life would be, caught between two homes when neither of them would welcome her.

The whole of her life (brief as it was) had seemed needless. Neither of them were fit or interested in being parents. There was honest kindness in bringing an end to the misery of her life before she was old enough to understand it. She did not even have a name, yet, and couldn’t be missed by a world that had never had the chance to see her.

But Edward sighed when he held her, and he felt the fluttering of her heart struggling against the graying of her cheeks. He looked at Federico—lingering longer now than he had before—and then he pulled the knife he kept at his waist and cut into the skin just under his nipple. The blood was red-and-hot and instant, slipping down his chest. Her cries turned feverish and her struggle renewed as he rolled her in his arms so her mouth could find the wound. She was ravenous at the taste of blood, snorting and sucking at it. 

“So we will take turns,” Federico said again. 

Edward nodded. “She should have a name.” 

Federico smiled again and nodded. “I will think while I eat. We can compare our favorites when it is my turn to feed her.” He ran his fingers through the little wisps of her hair, and then slid back into the sea. 

\--

They named her Florence when she was six days old. 

She learned to swim when she was two weeks old, in the cool fresh water pool where she paddled back and forth between the two of them, perfectly happy and at home in the water.

Her teeth grew in at a month in a half, so they fed her fish in sliver thin strings that she ate with great relish until her face and her hands were slimy from it.

She learned to dive beneath the water before she was three months old, exploring the shallow depth of the pool with her wide-round eyes open and unblinking against the sting of the water. She held her breath for (what felt like) _hours_ , until Edward was faint with worry and Federico pink with pride. She came up every time, clutching some new treasure she’d found at the bottom, gasping for the air she couldn’t draw from the water itself.

Federico fed her whole fish at five months, and cuts of larger prey that he deemed to share. When he was gone and she was inconsolable with hunger, Edward fed her fresh-hot-meat from the animals that he killed on the island. She ate with greedy hands and sharp teeth, ripping the meat from bones like an animal.

She was eight months and walking upright before Federico took her into the ocean. He was as reluctant as she was insistent, the two of them fighting in the sand with her chubby-round cheeks set in defiance to his refusal to take her. In the end, she won out with tears in her eyes. He took her into the rolling waves of the sea, down into the endless feast the ocean had to offer. They were gone for _hours_ , lost beneath the surface. No matter how hard Edward searched for the sight of their heads popping above the water to catch a breath of air, they never showed.

Florence came back with the tide, rolling onto the shore with her tiger-striped tail full of short and rounded spines and her fins awkward, half-realized bumps protruding here and there from her body. Her teeth were razor-sharp and bloody red and her wedded hands full of wriggling half-dead fish that she offered to him with obvious pride. Federico came behind her, lazy in the surf with the coil of his tail curled protectively around their daughter. 

“She caught you dinner,” he said.

“You said she wouldn’t have gills,” Edward said. He took the fish and smiled at her. Her fat arms were spread out for him to take her and he did, he laid her—cold as the ocean—into his lap and she yawned against his chest. 

“I did not think she would. The others—all of Ezio’s, they drown when they are born. We’ve never have one live so long.” His face was fond and his touch light when he ruffled her hair. “This one will live, I think.” 

\--

Edward had left many things behind when he ran off to commit himself to a fool’s errand. He had a half-finished life waiting for him beyond the endless roll of the tide. The old sense of _wanting_ that nagged at him when he was alone. Florence followed her Mother into the sea at dawn and came back to him in the evening, exhausted and fat on the fresh fish she had caught. The pair of them were perfect killers beneath the waves. 

She slept at his side in the same dirty bed she had been born in.

\--

Edward was no coward, of course, but he took the opportunity to leave when it came and there was no note to leave to explain why he had gone. The ship that ‘saved’ him from the desert island carried him back to the Jackdaw, and Ade and the life he’d left behind. If the lot of them—his crew, the assassins, Kidd or Adewale—had questions about where he’d gone or how he’d come by his fresh scars, they did not ask. 

\--

He passed a year, or two, struggling against the mistakes he had made. 

\--

It happened, in some shit hole where he washed ashore in a drunken fit, that he woke up face-down in the shit-smelling sand, not so far from the beaten boards that made the walk way. His hand was curled around a tipped-over bottle that had done a poor job of relieving him of his guilt and his anger. 

“Mother is very cross,” was the very small voice of a child he had not forgotten but left behind. She was wearing a poor-child’s dirty dress, sitting just above his head in the sand with her pretty-round eyes and her perfect porcelain skin. Her hair had grown in blond and wavy (like his, perhaps). “ _I_ ,” Florence said with _perfect_ indignation, “am very cross.”

Edward was hungover and _hurt_. He pushed himself up to sitting and looked at her—still very small, and very cleverly disguised—and then reached to pull her closer with one hand around her skinny-pale arm (cold under his palm) and she did not fight him. She came willingly and threw herself against his chest with both arms around his neck and her little face pressed to his skin. 

She cried there, and he rubbed her hair and he cried with her for all the things he’d lost and the stupid things he had done. Her face was warm with tears when she looked up at him, low and miserable, she whispered: “come home now. Can’t you come home now?”

“I have to finish what I started,” he said, “when I was very young and very stupid.” He smoothed his hand across her hair. “When it’s done, I’ll come home.” He kissed her forehead and he held her hand as they walked back to the shore. 

Federico was hiding there, in the waves, waiting for their daughter to come back to him. Edward watched her slip under the waves, growing long-and-sleek like the fish, and watched until she was gone again, swimming away to darker waters. 

\--

Florence was four years old when he saw her again—the flicker of her long striped tail through the water and then her head breaking the waves as they hit the beach. She shrieked when she saw him sitting on the beach. Her long arms dug into the sand as she crept across the shore and into his lap. Her long tail coiled around his body as she dug her pointed fingers into his neck and kissed his cheeks. 

“I told Mother you would come back! I told him!” She kissed him again and again.

She stayed on the shore with him, wearing her dirty dress and building sandcastles with him until the sky got too dark to see. She took him to the camp he’d left behind (many years ago) and showed him how she had built a house with Ezio and the other humans that lived there. She showed him the bed she’d made and the table and the chair. She gave him blankets rescued from shipwrecks and fell asleep still telling him all the things she had done while he was away.

\--

Federico did not come to the shore, but lurked in his sea bed until Edward came to find him. He was resplendent (as always), unimpressed by the sight of him (again). His tail flicked back and forth as he lounged and waited and thought of what he would do. In the end, he did nothing and the need to breathe dragged Edward back to the surface. 

When he went again, the next day, Federico had moved his bed and left behind nothing to show where he might have gone. Florence could find him, of course, and she came back at the end of every day with new stories of the things she had seen and the things she had eaten. 

\--

Edward stayed a month, and then two, teaching Florence all the fine and useless manners of her human heritage. She regarded forks as a waste of her time and cups as a foolish invention. But she brought him pretty things to decorate his little house and delicious things to eat. He brushed her hair and taught her how to sing.

She showed him how to find the village where Ezio kept his humans, and where to hunt for the best meat. 

Edward stayed two months, and Florence brought him shark teeth like trophies.

Edward stayed three months, and Florence sat on the shore with him, after dark, humming the songs her Mother had taught her. The whole of her little body vibrating with the depth of the hum. It was a captivating sound, a long-sorrowful-song that went unanswered.

Edward stayed four months and woke up to the stink of fish-and-seaweed. He opened his eyes to find the wink of the early morning light breaking through the cracks in his house. Federico was standing there with his human skin split in new scars as he looked down at his daughter sleeping with her face pressed against Edward’s arm and a blanket pulled up to her ears. 

“She won’t stop asking me to forgive you,” Federico said.

“I didn’t ask her to.”

Federico hummed at that and then sighed, “if you leave again, I will feed your flesh to our daughter.” He touched her hair, “I almost fed her to the shark like I promised I would.” The words were so flat there was no telling how Federico felt about it. “I could not find one that would take her. So I had to content myself with thoughts of how you would taste when I ate you in pieces, plucking you apart with precision to keep you alive the longest.”

Edward cleared his throat at that thought. He might have said something about how he valued his life, or apologize for how he had left (abruptly) but he found himself saying, “so you said breeding season was every fifty years—does that mean we can’t have sex for forty six years?”

Federico snorted. “You won’t be alive in forty six years.” But the words were fond. He pretended to consider the question. “I do not know,” was his answer, “you are the only human I have ever cared to try with.” 

Florence woke up with a smile and a squeal and pulled her Mother down into the bed to snuggle against his chest.


End file.
